My wife bought a refurbished HP laptop for her niece for xmas and tried it out first. Microsoft Windows was a nightmare - took hours to perform relatively simple tasks and get through multiple hedges of security. Then the day after we got a spam call on my house phone from somebody pretending to be from Microsoft. Unbelievable. The laptop also stopped working so it was sent back.
Replaced it with a new Chromebook laptop which was under £200 and works great - easy to use and my wife loves it. Perfect for a younger user and Chromebooks are getting more popular especially for students. I expect Chrome to be a serious contender to Microsoft next year in computer sales.
It might help to know model and age. We have a couple of used HP laptops running W10 and have no such performance problems. We also have a Core 2 Duo laptop well over 10 years old which is currently running W8.1 with no major problems and has been upgraded to W10 (to secure future use) then reverted to W8.1.
It does sound as though you didn't get the best specification and also the refurbishment may have left malware on it (unless a major coincidence).
So a refurbished HP (or Dell, or...) could be a good Xmas present.
My concern over a Chromebook would be use away from an internet connection (unless things have moved on).
I was a very early sampler of Chromebooks, for my wife, for just this reason. But neither of us found it easy and we didn't keep it for long. I don't doubt that modern ones are *much* better, and of course they will be fast, and as long as you have decent broadband or even 4G they should be fine for most uses.
As for the wife, I got her an M1 Air last xmas and she's not doing too badly. But I'm lucky, I can afford to.
Large families will obviously be better off with five chromebooks than one Mac.
If your budget is £200, you can get a reasonable Chromebook or a rather elderly windows laptop. However, the Chromebook won't (in my experience) have a FHD screen at that price. You'll need to spend at least £100 more to get that.
If you just want to browse online or use the chrome apps, a chromebook is fine.
Horses for courses. The main issues are that it has little local storage, it uses the cloud, so if you are comfy with everything running in Google lannd and have a very good internet connection then fine. Many people do use them and as an aside they do have a screenreader built in if you are blind.
However, you do need to either use native Chrome apps that either run in the cloud or use cloud storage. The limited local resources are the main drawback. Education like them since they are cheap and all students can be monitored for doing dodgy stuff rather than studying of course. grin. Our council has a lot and it has proved mainly good during the pandemic, as long as the connectivity is good and steady. Many can run Android apps, but not all of course. I believe its based on a Linux core.
I'm personally not sure I'd want all my eggs to be in Googles basket, as when they update their core programs it may cause issues for people who are used to working one way and now have to do it another way. Plus of course since most use the built in cloud apps, if Google mess up and leak your data or want to charge you for software, you are stuffed. I'm still old school and like my data local most of the time. Brian
Yes there are a lot of good slightly used Windows laptops. Beware of celeron, not enough ram which cannot be upgraded and mechanical drives, also how good is the battery? The Chromeboks have good battery life. If you want to buy new and are not tied to Windows I was very impressed by the latest small laptops Apple have, considering their cost and their speed I think Intel/Microsoft need to get their fingers out pretty fast. The m1 processor seems to run rings around the Intel ones does not get hot and the battery life is terrific. Can't run windows on it as yet, but Apple are teasing the next models may be able to.
Looked at new chromebooks 4 years ago. almost impossible to out Linux on,all tide to google so bought a cheap toshiba satellite. Nightmare. Now basically dead. so replaced with a refurbished HP laptop from laptops direct. Came without a disk like I asked, so slapped in the SSD and RAM from the toshiba and installed Linux Mint 20 and havent looked back. Brilliant little machine.
I was so pleased than when I needed to upgrade my desktop I bought an HP EliteDesk from the same supplier., Once again massively positive experience.
According to Google, it's really easy to 'install' linux - at least it is now - as follows:
Turn on Linux Linux is off by default. You can turn it on at any time from settings.
On your Chromebook, at the bottom right, select the time. Select Settings and then Advanced and then Developers. Next to ?Linux development environment?, select Turn on. Follow the on-screen instructions. Setup can take 10 minutes or more. A terminal window opens. You have a Debian 10 (Buster) environment. You can run Linux commands, install more tools using the APT package manager and customise your shell.
I tested the 32-bit version, back when it had just been discontinued. The software installed on one machine. I needed to use my Google account for the Internet side of it. (Their versions now are 64-bit.)
But when I attempted to install it on a second machine, it did not work. This means that presumably the driver set is not suited to every possible PC machine. The working machine had an NVidia video card. Real Chromebook machines would be better curated.
Install a blank hard drive in the target PC, before you use the installer. It writes a hell of a large number of partitions onto the disk, for an OS. I don't know why they need so many small partitions. (Everything labeled as a .img here, is a partition on a real disk drive.)
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But at least I did get to see what a ChromeBook looks like, without owning one.
CloudReady, means you're running it on x86. The software is available on more than one hardware platform.
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That site, also has a version for a Virtual Machine, for people who like that sort of thing. That would mean a lot less work, to view the result. But it's a VMWare, and I don't know what would happen if you unpacked the OVA onto VirtualBox. i've had a fair bit of trouble, when unpacking OVAs onto things where they don't belong. And the instructions say it doesn't work with VirtualBox graphics.
Since it works with a slightly older version of VMWare, you would have to track down the right version to run it on.
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A real ChromeBook, has six years of support (bottom page, examples).
That is not the same as a full blown user friendly X windows distro. And chromebooks are really a bit like android phones. You cant put an SSD in them for example.
You can get a refurbed chromebook for a tad over £100 but you can get a decent HP pavilion for under £200
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If you want a n I pad or a smart phone experience then a chromebook is fine. If you want a laptop computer, then frankly it isn't
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